The drive to make more effective use of physical resources within an enterprise information technology (IT) infrastructure has led to the introduction of virtual machine technology. Virtual machine (VM) technology allows one or more guest operating systems to run concurrently on one physical device. There are several approaches to providing virtualization technology, the most recent being para-virtualization and native central processing unit (CPU) with basic input/output system (BIOS) or Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) support. Concurrent with these approaches, the emergence of the management plane has occurred as the means by which hardware, operating system and applications are managed within the service plane.
One or more virtual machines may be operational on a single host computing system that will be referred to simply as a host system. A VM that may include an operating system with its concurrent applications is often separated from the elements that manage the VMs on the host system. The separation of management and service functionality has a number of distinct advantages that include separation of concerns, management of change and security improvements.
Finally, delegated management through the paradigm of Autonomic Computing has emerged. Autonomic Computing is a relatively recent field of study that focuses on the ability of computers to self-manage. Autonomic Computing is promoted as the means by which greater independence will be achieved in systems. This incorporates self-diagnosis, self-healing, self-configuration and other independent behaviors, both reactive and proactive. Such systems will adapt and learn normal levels of resource usage and predict likely points of failure in the system. Certain benefits of computers that are capable of adapting to their usage environments and recovering from failures without human interaction have also been known to reduce the total cost of ownership of a device and increasing levels of system availability. Repetitive work performed by human administrators is reduced, knowledge of the system's performance over time is retained, assuming that the machine records or publishes information about the problems it detects and the solutions it applies, and events of significance are detected and handled with more consistency and speed than a human could likely provide. Such autonomic elements are used in the context of this invention for virtual machine management.
The introduction of virtualization along with management and service plane separation has produced a new important problem. A VM may be required to migrate from one host system to another. Such a migration may be necessary in various situations. These include an increase in the load of the system currently hosting the VM, the occurrence of a fault in the host system, and the temporary unavailability of the system for hosting a VM due to routine maintenance. Specifically, if a virtual machine migrates, the associated units of manageability need to move as well, where the problem extends to more than simply moving code.
The general area of code mobility is well researched. Various environments for the general mobility of software and state have been built. However, there has been no such infrastructure for an autonomic element, which applies specifically to the system management domain where virtual machines are under management. In particular there is no effective mechanism for transferring a VM from one host to another on which the VM and the management of it can resume operation seamlessly. Thus there is a need in the industry for an effective method and system for virtual machine migration by using mobile autonomic elements.